Travellers, Representation, and Irish Culture
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A Sense of Place: Travellers, Representation, and Irish Culture PAUL DELANEY In the closing pages of his memoir, The Road to God Knows Where, the late Sean Maher sounded an almost apocalyptic note. Recalling a Traveller life that had been characterised by traditional associations with the road, Maher lamented ‘that soon this simplicity would be no more, that a people, a language and a culture would die in this horrible, modern world’.1 Maher’s remarks were made in 1972 and were set against a backdrop of increased industrialisation and urban development; evid- ently, they were also informed by the findings of the 1963 Report of the Commission on Itinerancy. Established by the Lemass administration, this report had sought to identify and solve ‘the problems of itinerancy’ in Ireland; its recommendations shaped official policy for decades to come. The report famously found that there was no alternative to housing ‘if a permanent solution to the problems of itinerancy, based on absorp- tion and integration is to be achieved’.2 It goes without saying that The Road to God Knows Where and the report of the commission were direct- ed towards very different ends—the former text was supportive of a nomadic lifestyle, for instance, in ways that the latter was not. However, when the two texts are read alongside each other, one could argue that they both prompt questions which are central to discussions with and about the Irish Travellers. Both texts are concerned with ascribing the Travellers a ‘place’ in modern Ireland, for example. Whereas Maher is anxious that changes in the base of the economy might result in the annihilation of an entire community (with Travellers apportioned no place to go), the reporters for the commission appear worried that, unless changes are brought about and Travellers are ‘settled’, this community will continue to remain marginal to the interests of Irish society (they will remain ‘with-out’, both literally and figuratively). Both texts also attempt to explore the often fraught relationship that has existed between the Traveller and the settled communities in Ireland. For Maher, this relationship had become 80 PAUL DELANEY increasingly uneasy by the early 1970s, to the point where it threatened the very existence of the Travellers; for the commission, the relationship had always been problematic and could only ever be resolved through strategies of assimilation and economic redress. Clearly, Maher’s Road to God Knows Where and the report of the commission were underwritten with opposing aspirations—they were concerned respectively with the survival and eclipse of what Maher was to term ‘a people’. In the pages that follow, I want to suggest that Maher’s use of this term bears some relevance for the philosophy of republicanism (keeping in mind the fact that republicanism is founded upon the concepts of res publica and ‘the people’ and that it privileges principles of democracy and citizenship), and I want to suggest this by drawing particular reference to questions of representation and culture. In the inaugural issue of this journal, Liam O’Dowd distinguished between nationalist and republican thinking by remarking that ‘the question for nationalists is who belongs to the nation?; for republicans, it is who are the people?’3 This distinction is both succinct and suggestive and should be kept in mind in the course of this brief essay. At the same time, it will be useful to remember Daltún Ó Ceallaigh’s rejoinder, also included in a previous number of this journal, concerning the compatibility and interplay between nationalist and republican positions.4 Ó Ceallaigh drew attention to the national and international dimensions of republican thought and warned against imagining too ready a division between nationalism and republicanism; he argued this through reference to what he perceived were the different evocations of nationalism, which, in turn, are expressive of fundamentalist, conservative, liberal, and/or socialist concerns. Ó Ceallaigh’s point is derived from recent comp- arative studies that have discerned a historical ambiguity at the heart of the nationalist project. This ambiguity has been used to point towards a characteristic ‘double-poise’ in political nationalism—as it looks forwards and backwards, to modernity and the archaic, and as it threatens to always slip between emancipation and aggression (in the fight against imperialism, for instance, but also in maintaining strategies of exclusion and underdevelopment). It is worthwhile to explore these issues a little further. The Marxist critic Tom Nairn, for example, has argued that ‘all nationalism is both healthy and morbid’, since ‘progress and regress are inscribed in it … from the start. This is a structural fact about it. And it is a fact to which there are no exceptions’.5 Significantly, this sense of ambiguity has been used to distinguish between ethnic and civic forms of nationalism. This distinction can be summarised briefly: ethnic nationalism has been TRAVELLERS, REPRESENTATION, AND IRISH CULTURE 81 defined as a collective form of identification that is based upon the significance of an almost mystical ethnie—that is to say, a racial essence, which grounds identity in exclusive and inherited characteristics. Civic nationalism, by contrast, has been thought to stress the importance of fluidity and self-awareness in the make-up of any populace and to understand the basic idea of the nation in terms of an imagined community of citizens living in a prescribed geographical space (a classic literary example of this being advanced by Bloom in the ‘Cyclops’ section of Ulysses). Ethnic nationalism, it is argued, frustrates the potential for any form of development and inevitably leads to states of exclusion and paralysis, whilst civic nationalism is alive to change and allows for expansive conditions of citizenship and cultural inclusivity. (‘What is your nation if I may ask, says the citizen.—Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland’.) Distinguishing between these formulations, students of nationalism have, nonetheless, also remarked that all nationalist projects share to varying degrees in ethnic and civic ambitions. For example, Nairn, once again, has warned against delineating too easily between good and bad forms of nationalism, arguing that a regressive/progressive ambiguity is inherent within all nationalist formations, since ‘forms of irrationality’ and prejudice ‘stain’ their founding principles.6 I want to suggest that such theories confound any clear-cut republican- nationalist division. Returning to O’Dowd’s thesis, for instance, one is reminded of the claim that nationalists traditionally ask ‘who belongs to the nation?’, whereas, republicans ponder ‘who are the people?’. Rehearsing this claim in the light of ethnic and civic formations, it could be argued that civic nationalism transgresses O’Dowd’s implicit either/or logic by raising questions of belonging and engaging with issues of citizenship—civic nationalism subjects the conditions for belonging to scrutiny, for instance, and does this through an interrogation of the concept of ‘the people’. How this concept is defined, whether it incorporates marginal as well as dominant forms of identity (‘a people’ … ‘the people’), how it negotiates with ideas of difference, and whether it manages to represent marginal interests within an inclusive or participatory model of democracy—all of these issues are vital to the projects of republicanism and civic nationalism, and all of these questions are raised in cultural representations of the Travellers. As much is suggested in the titles—and also in the underlying arguments—of two comparatively recent texts: Jim Mac Laughlin’s Travellers and Ireland: Whose Country, Whose History? and Travellers: Citizens of Ireland, which was compiled by the Parish of the Travelling 82 PAUL DELANEY People.7 Mac Laughlin’s text is interesting, here, since it attests to the extent to which the Travellers have been traditionally precluded from discussions of modern Ireland. Although Travellers are occasionally included in the pages of Irish literature (in works by Synge, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Pádraic Ó Conaire, Thomas MacDonagh, Liam O’Flaherty, and Bryan MacMahon, amongst others), most canonical historical texts, by nationalist and revisionist scholars alike, have excluded all mention of this vulnerable minority. Indeed, on the rare occasions when the Travellers have been included within the index of Irish history, it has typically been in the guise of non-agents or passive recipients of the historical process—either as extra-national vagrants, for instance, or as victims of evictions, plantations, and the great famine. The consensus, as Patricia McCarthy once suggested, has been that the fight for independ- ence ‘was not theirs and did not involve them’, since they were too personally preoccupied by the struggle for survival to appreciate a conflict that was based on ideology or long-term ambition.8 Such readings have been used to authorise and foreclose discussions about the Travellers’ non-involvement in the course of Irish history. (This is despite the fact that alternative references to the agency of Travellers do exist—a celebrated instance being provided by Nan Joyce, when she alluded to the involvement of some families in the smuggling of arms during the revolutionary period.9) Such readings have also been used to deny Travellers a place in Irish society and to see them, rather, as an irritant and an anachronism in the modern nation state. A counterblast to all of this was provided in Travellers: Citizens of Ireland. Acknowledging the social and cultural importance of Travellers to Irish society, the contributors to this volume advanced the need for an acceptance of the rights and the responsibilities of Travellers as citizens of the republic. The double-stressed nature of this demand, for rights and responsibilities, evoked principles that are implicit in any understanding of civic politics and was founded upon a spirit of protection and public accountability—quite simply, it recognised that Travellers have duties to live up to as well as rights to claim.